‘Trees’ (1990-1991) by Joan Mitchell My good friend George Wingate sent me a heartening article from the Financial Times, In praise of older women, by Jackie Wullschlager. While I could be accused of being self serving to highlight it here given that I am both female and aging, it suggests a shift (a trend? a […]
Science
Journey In
Photomicrograph of different components of the rat cerebellum, including Purkinje neurons in green, glia (non-neuronal cells) in red, and cell nuclei in blue. (Image from Hello I am Here.) Carl Schoonover’s Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century was reviewed in the New York Times on November 29, and […]
Up Against Oblivion
Sargy Mann, blind painter Here’s a story I have never encountered before. Sargy Mann spends 25 years as a painter and ends up losing his sight. But he decides to keep painting. From an article about Mann by Tim Adams in the Guardian: “After a bit I thought: ‘Well here goes,’ and loaded a brush […]
- Philosophy
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Tinker Away
It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain […]
Neri Oxman and Materialecology
Ab Ex at the MOMA The works of Abstract Expressionists are on view on multiple floors at the MOMA right now. Worth the visit, but it wasn’t a heart stopper for me. It felt more like the obligatory pilgrimage devout Catholics make to the Vatican out of respect rather than passion. My MOMA moments of […]
- Science
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Error and the Adjacent Possible
Kevin Kelly and Steve Johnson (Illustration: Jason Holley, Wired) This is a follow on to my earlier post about Steve Johnson’s new book, Where Ideas Come From. These excerpts are from a conversation between Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants, and Steve Johnson published in Wired: *** Kelly: Really, we should think of ideas […]
Good Ideas are Networks
At a AAAS meeting back in the 70s, I remember hearing Stephen Jay Gould outline the then new theory of punctuated equilibrium. In addition to the long periods of statis in the evolution of a species, Gould also demonstrated his belief that evolution was like a many sided polygon wheel—it doesn’t roll forward smoothly but […]
Incomplete is Not a Dirty Word
Assembling reality is mostly patchwork (from Anna Hepler’s exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art) More on the theme of being right and the cost of that fixation (referenced earlier in this post): An article appeared in the Sunday New York Times Book review last week that speaks to our proclivity to put blinders on […]
- Science
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Books, Google, Intelligence and Neuroscience
Complexity and flow: Never what is seems Nicholas Carr’s latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, continues to spawn conversations regarding what we can and cannot know about the effect of cybertechnology on our brains and cognitive abilities. (A recent post about the book is here with links to earlier […]
Edging Beyond the Edge
Mystical metaphysics meets science: The Economist has reviewed the new book, The Grand Design, written by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. This passage is full of possibility: The main novelty in “The Grand Design” is the authors’ application of a way of interpreting quantum mechanics, derived from the ideas of the late Richard Feynman, to […]